LONG BEACH, Calif. (Nov. 7, 2017) – A key attraction to choosing human development as a course of college study is the flexible career choices it provides, with futures possible in fields like social work, counseling, criminal justice, nursing, law and medicine. For California State University Long Beach’s human development majors, these myriad career choices are made possible because of an excellent education.

In June 2016, Alexandra Jaffe, a member of the university since 2001 and current chair of Linguistics, saw the publication of her latest book, Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances, with Cambridge University Press, co-authored with an international team of scholars—Sari Pietkainen (Finland), Helen Kelly-Holmes (Ireland) and Nikolas Coupland (Wales). The book is the culmination of a four-year collaborative project funded by the Finnish Academy in which Jaffe and her colleagues explored how the “new circumstances” of globalization inflect the meanings of speaking “small”—that is, indigenous (Sami) and minority languages (Corsican, Welsh and Irish) on the “peripheries” of Western Europe.

This fall, anthropology and linguistics’ Barbara LeMaster looks forward to being the director of CSULB’s new degree program in American Sign Language Linguistics and Deaf Cultures (ASLD). The program will offer a one-two punch of bachelor’s degrees in ASL Linguistics and Deaf Cultures with an option in ASL-English interpretation.
“This is a major that will attract a lot of students,” said LeMaster, who joined the university in 1988. “I hope our students use this degree to enter fields as various as law enforcement or any service profession. If they meet someone who is deaf, they can speak to them directly. We are unique in the nation in the way we train our students to be linguists. Nobody else trains their people this way.”

History’s Emily Berquist Soule is on her way to completing her next book on the Atlantic slave trade thanks to being the first College of Liberal Arts faculty member to win the $10,000 Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) Internal Research Award.